Switcher on Tiger
Whenever a new operating system comes out of the factory gates at Apple I am very excited. I can't sleep until I have installed it and fiddled with it for a few hours. However, all of that is meaningless until I know how one of Apple's famous Switchers feels about the OS.Luckily Jeremiah Cohick has heard my pleas and has just written about his second impressions about Tiger. Overall he recommends the update to all, however, he also thinks, 'surface features are mediocre and bugs abound.'
It isn't enough to make him switch back though, and really isn't that all that matters?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tom in London said 11:55AM on 6-15-2005
I installed Tiger a month ago, and have had nothing but trouble. So much trouble that today I went back to 10.2.7, which was what was on the CD that came with my PowerBook about 2/3 years ago. It only gradually dawned on me that after I'd disabled Spotlight and trashed Dashboard, as both completely useless for what I do with the computer (serious work!) there was NOTHING in Tiger that I didn't already have with the previus version of OSX. Not only that, Tiger was full of internal incompatibilities and bugs that made everything a nightmare. I ended up spending all my time in the Apple Tiger Discussions forum, trying to find work-arounds and fixes for problems I simply should not have. There, I discovered many other users experiencing the same problems and trying every conceivable trick to try and fix them. This with a new, much-trumpeted Mac OS! I am deeply in shock now, as the total mess that is Tiger indicates some very serious management and strategy problems, right at the top of Apple. Big deal if Tiger starts up a little faster, not much of a deal if basic functions like printing, connecting to the Internet, opening applications ,etc., all become problematic. I found Tiger intrusive and time-wasting, and the worst part was, I found myself talking to nerds who prided themselves on knowing how Tiger works, and preaching to ordinary users like myself about all the things I was doing wrong. It was just like the world of Windows, where the average user really doesn't know what is wrong with the OS, and has to pay fat pimply palefaced guys to fix it, without actually knowing what they've fixed, and who (as we know) programme in future things that will go wrong so that we'll have to call them again. Well, I don't recognise Apple in any of this, and I am coming round to thinking it's all deliberate. Nobody as good as Apple (was) can suddenly put out such a poor-quality product as this. I'm happy again now that I've re-intalled the older OS, but I'm not sure where to go next. I won't be installing new versions of OSX until I'm 120% sure that all of these problems have been sorted out. But I'm not sure they WILL be sorted out.
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Macaday said 8:53AM on 6-16-2005
Well done you. Any new OS carries some problems and compared to OS9 or ANY Win OS it is phenomenally reliable. I can report totally positive experiences on an iMac G5 and can only suspect that the failures some people are are experiencing are through user handling.
Using Photoshop, Word, NoteTaker, iView, Entourage, iTunes, iMovie, Dreamweaver and the highly useful Dashboard (Wikipaedia, BBC Radio, iClip, Converter, Translator etc) and it seems to all to go a bit quicker under Tiger. I still wish for MS Word to become less bloated and less demanding on the system and the same with Photoshop 9.00 (CS2).
If you have problems 10.4.2 should be out this week and let's hope that YOUR problems are all fixed with it!
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Mark H said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I switched to the Mac almost exactly one year ago. I really loved using Panther, and I like the new features in Tiger, but I have to admit that after upgrading to Tiger I am very disappointed in Apple. Although the OS itself is very stable and almost never crashes (four times in a year with Panther and Tiger, and one of those was obviously my fault for disabling a required kernal extension), I have had an unacceptably large number of application crashes after upgrading to Tiger.
For example, just yesterday, in trying to drag pictures out of iPhoto to assemble a DVD of photos for a friend, iPhoto froze on me (spinning beach ball, leading to force quit) close to twenty times. It was literally every three minutes or so for an hour. I finally, through much trial and error, figured out a series of seemingly random steps, such as clicking in certain panes of the UI after certain types of operations, that I could take to avoid the crashes, but the experience was infuriating. I am very disappointed in Apple's apparent lax attitude towards regression testing, and bug testing in general, of their software. Windows also has plenty of problems (security in particular), but I will happily give MS credit for ironing out most user interface bugs prior to software shipment.
That said, I will never switch back to Windows, even if it eventually surpasses OS X in usability. The reason for this is TCPA, aka Palladium, aka "trusted" computing (see here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html if you don't know what this is). I refuse to give any company, and especially one like MS that has demonstrated a predatory attitude towards its customers, complete control over what I do with my computer. Maybe some day I'll swich to GNU/Linux (I've tried it several times in the past and found it lacking in usability), but for now the Mac is the only solution that meets my needs.
Hopefully either 10.4.2 or application updates will fix the application stability problems soon, and I will be a happy Mac user again.
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JonathanW said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
[Aside: It's actually "Jeremiah Cohick", in case the Lee isn't ringing anyone's bell re: the ad he was in.]
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Scott McNulty said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Thanks Jonathan, I fixed it and gave you a star. :)
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robert duffy said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I bought my Powerbook last year around April and love it to death. But I have to say, after reading all the reviews and opinions on Tiger, I have absolutely no interest in upgrading. I've not seen anything that convinces me otherwise.
If I am missing a magic review, send it my way... Until then I ain't upgrading!
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Jordan Merrick said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
i took the plunge and upgraded to tiger and have to say i'm extremely happy. my imac g5 has never been quicker. from the startup sound to a cursor on my desktop is probably double the speed it was before, now only a matter of seconds. it's incredibly fast, and has not crashed once...though i don't really have a yardstick since panther didn't do this either.
i'm a switcher...though i switched completely about 6 years ago now and think apple have gone from strength to strength. i do agree that there had been a slowdown of sorts with the hardware development, though i think the wide acceptance and praise of tiger should boost that. for the first time in years we may soon be seeing mac ads...
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Brian said 12:47AM on 6-21-2005
That's all that matters? What the hell kind of attitude is that?
"Well, the changes are superficial, and there are more bugs than ever, but if Average Joe Switcher [who?] is willing to put up with it, then I consider it a success!"
If we continue to accept buggy software, software with "hot new features" that serve no real purpose other than to make us upgrade our hardware, then we will continue get such software.
I've been a Mac user for as long as I've had a computer, but I've really lost a lot of faith in Apple (and Adobe; the same comments apply) this time around. As soon as there's a viable alternative (ie, if Microsoft gets their act together [HAH]), I'm outta here.
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entica said 5:46PM on 6-29-2005
To #1, although your comments are going to be slammed by most responders on here, I have to 100% agree. I used to be an Apple die-hard but I have to admit that I'm pretty jaded and upset with Apple lately. Where's the hardware innovation we used to see 4ish years ago? Tiger sucks - bad! It's so incredibly buggy on my G5 that I'm going to fall back to Panther. Whereas Panther never crashed on me and neither did the software, I have to reboot Tiger daily and have constant software crashes. It's like using friggin' Windows! PC hardware is lightyears ahead of the Mac, too bad there's no decent OS for it.
I love OSX. But I just can't take it's latest incarnation nor the mediocore hardware Apple is giving us these days.
To Jobs: ENOUGH with the iPOD already! I realize it puts gas in your jet but please at least re-divert some of those Apple resources back to the great hardware innovation Apple used to be known for. And while you're at it, fix Tiger (although I'm sure you're already working on that one).
Entica.
Ok Apple Fanboys, unleash your flaming fury.
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